The Equal Justice Initiative Is Launching an American Lynching Memorial

It holds 800 counties accountable for their history.

More than twenty thousand stones lay throughout Berlin, Germany, markers that signify where victims of the Holocaust were taken before they were forced into a concentration camp. In Rwanda, there are major memorial sites for victims of the country's genocide, one of which is the Kigali Genocide Memorial, which houses the remains of more than 250,000 victims. In the United States, a controversy over Confederate monuments has risen to the forefront of the news cycle with many questioning their significance to American history. The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a legal rights organization, recently announced an effort to remember the lives lost at the hands of white supremacy, including those in the Confederate south – the victims of lynching.

In the United States, more than 4,000, black Americans were lynched between 1877 and 1950, according to the organization's data. EJI plans to honor them with the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which will be located in Montgomery, Alabama, and is set to open April 26, 2018. According to EJI, the memorial will stretch across six acres.

“Our goal isn’t to be divisive,” EJI Director Bryan Stevenson told The New York Times. “Our goal is just to get people to confront the truth of our past with some more courage.”

“Our nation’s history of racial injustice casts a shadow across the American landscape. This shadow cannot be lifted until we shine the light of truth on the destructive violence that shaped our nation, traumatized people of color, and compromised our commitment to the rule of law and to equal justice,” Stevenson told AL.com.

In addition to honoring the the dead, the Memorial for Peace and Justice aims to acknowledge and educate regarding the nation's history and the events surrounding the brutality of lynchings. Visitors to the memorial will see 800 columns, one for each county where the organization documented racial lynchings — but the columns do not support the building; instead, they hang from the ceiling’s framework, mirroring the image of lynchings in public squares. Over 4,000 names will be etched in the columns.

The same amount of columns will lay in the grass just outside of the memorial, each bearing the name of a county where lynchings took place. According to EJI, each county listed will be invited by the EJI to retrieve their monument and place it where the lynching took place.

“Over time, the national memorial will serve as a report on which parts of the country have confronted the truth of this terror and which have not,” EJI wrote on their site.

The announcement of the memorial’s opening comes nearly two years after EJI released a report documenting more than 4,000 lynchings between 1877 and 1950. According to The New York Times, after the release of the report, Stevenson decided to add soil collected from lynching sites around America, which will be shelved at the museum for guests to confront.

“In this soil there is a sweat of the enslaved. In the soil there is the blood of victims of racial violence and lynching. There are tears in the soil from all those who labored under the indignation and humiliation of segregation. But in the soil there is also the opportunity for new life, a chance to grow something hopeful and healing for the future,” Stevenson says on EJI site.